264 The Trees of Great Britain and Ireland 



few black walnuts of large size, and met with men who were travelling about 

 purposely to find and buy them in all accessible places. In the North Carolina 

 forestry exhibit at the St. Louis Exhibition in 1904, I saw a walnut log from a 

 tree in Jackson County, Kentucky, over 12 feet long and 52 inches in diameter 

 which had evidently been lying long in the forest, and had been repeatedly burnt 

 over, which produced over 800 cubic feet of timber, and was sold, as I was told, for 

 $800. I heard of another still standing in Kentucky which was valued at $1000. 



These great trees are now hardly to be seen except in remote regions where it 

 is impossible to get them out, and when I visited the Lower Wabash Valley in 

 southern Illinois, where Prof. R. Ridgway^ found the largest deciduous trees in the 

 United States, I did not see one of great size. Dr. J. Schneck, who was my guide 

 and who knows the flora of this region better than anyone, gives in his Catalogue 

 of the Flora of the Lower Wabash, the measurements of a tree taken by himself as 

 follows: Circumference, at 3 feet above the swell of the root, 22 feet; height of 

 trunk to first branch, 74 feet; total height, 155 feet. Prof. Ridgway measured 

 another 15 feet in girth at 3 feet, and 71 feet to the first branch, where the trunk 

 was 3 feet in diameter. Assuming such trees to have measured 1 2 feet in girth in 

 the middle they would contain 600 to 700 feet of clean timber in the first length 

 alone, and now be worth as much as many acres of the land they grew on would 

 fetch when cleared for agriculture. 



But in regions which have colder summers and poorer soil, the black walnut 

 does not attain anything like these dimensions, and I have seen none in New 

 England which equal the best trees in Britain. Emerson'' speaks of one in the 

 Botanic Garden at Cambridge, Mass., as measuring 6 feet 3 inches at 3 feet from 

 the ground, and the tree which he figures growing near Roslyn was a poor specimen 

 of small size. 



In Canada it was once abundant in the rich forests of Southern Ontario, 

 but almost all the old trees have been cut down, and plantations are now 

 being made in various parts of Ontario and Western Quebec, and in Alberta 

 and British Columbia, as well as in many parts of the United States from 

 Kansas to California. 



Black walnuts of great size are indeed now so rare that I have been unable to 

 procure a really good photograph of the tree in its native forest, and there is none in 

 Pinchot and Ashe's Timber Trees of N. Carolina. These authors say that it bears 

 seed abundantly only every three or four years, and that young seedlings are not 

 common except in low fertile, rather open lands, or in meadows which border 

 streams. The growth is very rapid until the tree has reached a large size ; only 

 small trees send up shoots from the stump. 



The tree, however, has been so largely planted in many parts of the States and 

 in Canada, and succeeds so well, even so far west as British Columbia, that it may 

 again become generally useful as a timber tree. 



' Proc. U.S. Nat. Museum, 1882, p. 49. " Trees of Massachusetts, i. 213. 



